Story – Page 3 – Laura Stavoe

April 2, 2021April 2, 2021

Library of Love

Tending to Endings (fifty-four)

When my sisters and I left home, my mom turned our childhood bedroom into what she called the Resource Room. She wanted a place to keep books and videos she liked to loan out to people, usually about gardening or other cultures or parenting or world peace.

The shelves included titles by her favorite authors Aldo Leopold, Parker Palmer, Annie Dillard, and Marian Wright Edelman. A case within kid reach held books by Mem Fox, Shel Silverstein, and Beverly Cleary. She had the full series of the Little House books and her own childhood favorites about Betsy, Tacy and Tib.

Kids could also find bags of blocks and bins full of Legos in the Resource Room, or an African sun harp, a ukulele, and a shoebox full of kazoos. There were fresh magic markers, piles of paper, and sometimes even finger paint.

After the grandchildren had grown, neighbor kids came over and could almost always talk my mom into sitting on the floor with them to build a tower.

The Resource Room and Mom’s other love, her garden!
**PSA: Remember to take photos of the family photographer**

More than a resource room, mom had an enthusiasm room. Sometimes we talk about teachers as people motivated by self-sacrifice, but I don’t think my mom saw it that way. She shared knowledge because it spilled out from her and needed somewhere to go. She wanted you to have the same opportunities for epiphanies and creativity she did. Shared learning was her favorite way to connect. In today’s lingo, learning was my mom’s love language.

The grandchildren learned many things from Mom’s example.

Last weekend my son Dylan came by to install a late birthday present and an early Mother’s Day gift, surprising me with the little library we had talked about last fall. I thought it would be fun to put one on the trail behind our backyard where people often hike past to enter the trail system.

Dylan built it in the colors and fashion of our old Elkhaven house in the mountains we lived in during the boys grade school years. I loved the idea of it surprising people on their hike, though it puts some faith in people’s willingness to carry a book a short ways down the hill!

Our first visitors Olivia and Rob brought some books to share

I have certainly inherited my mom’s enthusiasm for sharing whatever I’m learning at the exact moment I’m learning it. It’s one of the reasons writing this blog has been rewarding for me. And I expect I will soon have more learning to share, as next week I’m beginning a class towards certification as an end-of-life doula through INELDA (The International End-of-Life Doula Association).

I don’t know if doula is the role I’m after, exactly. But I am open and excited to learn. I’m also grateful to each of you for reading along. I have missed writing a post weekly, and I think of things to tell you all month long! It turns out, shared learning is my love language, too. Well, that and really good coffee.

More Resources

Someday when I decide how to organize it, I will resurrect my resource page on the website. In the meantime, here are a few new finds on the theme of endings.

A Tale for The Time Being. A Novel by Ruth Ozeki.

It’s not often that I read a book twice because there is just so much to read! But recently I’ve returned to two books that I have wanted to continue to carry with me. One was Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I wrote about last summer.

A Tale for the Time Being, the second, is fiction told through multiple characters and voices. It offers meditations on the meaning of life and death across cultures and generations; on climate change and technology and bullying; on losing a parent or a child; on the wisdom and the blind spots of elders, and the wisdom and blind spots of the young; on suicide and endangered species and trees. On the power of words to transcend time and place.

I’m not sure how Ozeki fit so much thought into a book. or how she did so in a way that is artful and engaging even when the topics are disturbing or complicated. I found the book ultimately hopeful, creative, and reassuring. Ozeki’s site has a short video about the book.

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. A Memoir by Terry Tempest Williams

I taught a workshop and took a writing workshop last month and in both courses someone recommended Terry Tempest William’s book published in 2013, which I took as a sign.

When Williams’ mom was dying of cancer, she asked her to take her journals home with her, but to not read them until she was gone. There were three shelves full of journals, and Williams did as her mother asked. After her mother’s death, Williams opened each of the journals and discovered every page of every book was blank.

The fifty-four short chapters that follow are reflections born of those empty pages. It is a beautiful, poignant book, and it especially spoke to me now as I have become aware of the blank spaces that are inevitable after any loss. Mom and I were close, and still there are so many stories she never told me, so many questions I never thought to ask. Williams book is about loss, but also, it is about different ways of knowing, and different forms of strength. It is about how sometimes silence can be a powerful choice.

Dick Johnson is Dead. A Film by Kirstin Johnson.

When I was only a third of the way into the documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead, I was already reaching out to my sisters and friends over text asking—Have you seen this yet? They all came back, No, should I? And I answered, Not sure yet.

Now I’m sure. This film is in turns, creative, heart-hurting, funny, weird, sad, ethically complicated, beautiful, and so very true to the experience of Alzheimer’s. Or at least, for me, the experience of being a daughter watching a parent (in my case my mother) affected by Alzheimer’s.

There are many moments when Johnson was filming her dad and I saw something so very familiar. Probably most poignant was watching how Dick Johnson maintained his wit and charm, long after he lost the ability to understand or feel that joy behind it. He was charming by rote, by habit. The fact that this happened to another besides my mom seemed both a sadness and a salve.

If you aren’t sure about this one, you may want to start with an interview with Kirsten Johnson on Fresh Air in which she speaks to the challenges including ethical questions around the making the film.

Departures. A Film Directed by Yojiro Takita.

My cousin, Kevin recommended the film Departures after following my posts, and I’m so glad he did! It is a film that won an Academy Award best foreign language film in 2009, and there are many things that make it an excellent film: the music, the filming, the engaging story that took unexpected turns. But I think what it brought into focus for me most was how rituals and traditions around tending to the body of a loved one after death, can help us through all the other more nebulous parts of loss–the grief, the unanswered questions, the denial, the fear.

Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak. Interview with Larry Kimura

*Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau Refuge and Kīlauea Crater on the Big Island (2018)*

As soon as I listened to this episode of Code Switch, I sent it to all of my family members, and I wished I could share it with my mom. Hawai’i is sacred ground for my mom, and she considered it a privilege to spend time on the islands and to work with students at the grade school in Lahaina each week. She would’ve loved this hopeful story born of one man’s passion to keep the Hawaiian language and culture alive.

He Mele Aloha No Ka Niu. A Poem by Brandy Nālani McDougall

He Mele Aloha no ka Niu is one of many beautiful poems included in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo. This poet first caught my eye because she is from Kula in Maui’s upcountry, another place my mom loved. Like Kimura’s work, McDougall’s poems also speak to the theme of language and culture, lost and sometimes found.

Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo

And then I’ll leave you with one more short poem by Joy Harjo that felt like a gift this morning when I happened upon it. You can read or listen to Eagle Poem at The Poetry Foundation.

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Mahalo,

Laura

Jane Stavoe in her element with Bailey, Gabe, and Jeff.

February 5, 2021November 29, 2022

About This

Tending to Endings (fifty-two)

My mom’s last clear words were, “You know, we’ll probably need to laugh about this.” She said them days before she died, when she was no longer eating or drinking. When the most we usually got was a wince for pain, or a puckering of lips when she wanted us to come in close for a kiss.

That morning, upon awakening, she noted our dismay at the state of things—her wound, the need to turn her to relieve bedsores, our pain at seeing her pain when we did. The words sounded exactly like what my mom would’ve said pre-Alzheimer’s, pre-cancer, pre-dying. They were a balm for my despair. Mom was still herself.

Mom never ever forgot that life for all its sacredness was also very funny and she worked hard to not let me forget it either. My tendency to be sensitive and serious–or as she would say it, to feel things very deeply–was what she liked best and least about my personality.

When I was young, and my sister Sandy (two years younger) was being difficult, she would tell her to go play out in the middle of Highway 83. Sandy, would grin, eyes sparkling. And I would burst into tears because my mom never told me to play in the middle of Highway 83, which I took as evidence that they had a special something.

When my mom would recount this story later, she said, “I couldn’t say that to you because you would’ve gone and done it!”

Sometimes when I think of the writing I do about my mom and how she would feel about it, I think she would remind me to include more funny parts.

I am better at laughing at myself and at life than I was as a child, but it has taken a village to get me there, a village led by my mother.

This was true even throughout her illness. When we were caregiving, and she would notice my father or sisters or I getting serious and sad, she would emerge with some quip. Part of this may have been distraction from pain. But, more than that it seemed she was saying, hey, it’s me. I’m here!. My mom was never one for melodrama, and I suspect our moments of intense emotion made her feel a little lonely.

On the morning my mom died, we called our hospice nurse, Noelle. She came and helped us bathe my mom one more time. It was an unexpected task that felt emotional and sacred. Also, I am a kinesthetic learner, and it was good for me to have something physical to do, something that held me there in the room while the fact of my mother’s death caught up with me.

Afterwards when we had mom dressed in a silky blue top and the shorts she liked to wear, and covered her in a prayer shawl Amy brought, Noelle said she would call the mortuary and we could either have Mom’s body picked up right away or we could spend some time with her. Amy and Dad and I kind of looked at each other. It was one of those moments where we weren’t sure what we were supposed to want, much less what we did want. Did we want more time with my mom’s body?

And then my dad looked at the clock and saw it was 9:30. And the three of us remembered, the dishwasher installer was coming sometime between 10 and noon.

“Let’s wait a bit,” my dad said, “I need to figure out what to do about the dishwasher delivery.”

I wished my dad didn’t actually named the reason. It seemed wrong to have a decision about my mother’s dead body hinge on an appliance repair schedule. But, Noelle had been our hospice nurse for five months now, and she knew and accepted us with all our quirks. Also, she was aware our mom and wife had just died, so we might not make much sense.

Before Noelle left to visit her next patient, she told us to turn the air conditioner on high. She said she would never ever forget my mother, and I could tell she meant it. She hugged each of us.

At first my dad and Amy and I decided since it was likely on its way, it would be simplest to just close the bedroom door and wait for the dishwasher. We knew how hard it was to get things scheduled in Maui, and admittedly, we were tired of doing dishes by hand. Given all the care my mom needed, it had been the least of our worries, but now, was it wrong to want one thing to be easier?

Amy, as though reading my mind, said, “Mom would definitely want us to have a working dishwasher.”

But as soon as I went to pull the bedroom door closed, the whole thing felt wrong. Like I was hiding something. (Maybe even a dead body!) Like the incongruity between having something as mundane as a dishwasher installation in one room while my mom’s body was in the other might make me explode. Would I even be able to keep the secret? Or would I burst like some character out of a story by Edgar Allen Poe?

I returned to my dad and said, “Maybe we should track this guy down and see if he can come this afternoon?”

My dad was even more bereft than I and thus open to suggestion. He called to get the number of the driver and left a vague message about a death in the family (not specifying the death was in our condo). He said, “I know it’s probably already on the truck, so maybe come right away or late this afternoon?”

“Should I call the mortuary?” I asked.

“Let’s give them a couple minutes to respond,” my dad said, setting down his phone, staring out to the sea.

I made phone calls to family members and found myself compulsively explaining to my Aunt Gail the complication of the dishwasher delivery being scheduled at the same time as the mortuary pick-up.

Gail, a nurse, is good in a crisis. “I don’t want to be bossy, Laura,” she said with a small laugh, “But cancel the dishwasher.”

“I know,” I said, making a firm commitment to myself to do so as soon as I was off the phone. Who cares if we ever have a dishwasher? My mom was dead.

Then the doorbell rang and its seven tolls echoed throughout the condo. “Well, hello! You’re here, come on in!” my dad said in his cheery midwestern voice, as if this was any old day.

And then a man wearing a Blazing Saddles baseball cap introduced himself as Rocky, and made his way towards the kitchen followed by a quieter, skinny man rolling a dolly with the giant box containing, I assumed, our new dishwasher.

I leaned the guest bedroom door closed and crept to the very back corner of the room hoping my aunt didn’t hear and wouldn’t judge us for not immediately cancelling the dishwasher delivery the moment my mother died.

After my conversation with Gail, I made calls from the lanai, where I could compete with the sound of the surf rather than the sounds of the old dishwasher being extracted.

I called my aunt Carol who had been in Maui helping to care for Mom the month before. We were both teary and somehow unbelieving of the news we had known was coming for months. While we talked, my eyes were trained on the water the way they always are in Maui, and I told Carol when a sea turtle swam to the edge of the coral reef in the water below.

“A good sign,” I said.

Then two men walked from the beach up to the seawall and as one stepped up the stairs, I saw the other reach for him to turn him around. At first I thought an argument, and then the reacher dropped down on one knee in the sand, extended a hand with a small (not-a-dishwasher) box.

I narrated all of this for Carol.

“Your mama is loving all this life happening,” she said.

I turned around to the bedroom to my mom’s body on he other side of the glass slider. Saw her chest not rising or falling with breath. Saw her not laughing or wincing or wondering or talking, not thinking, not breathing.

I said goodbye to Carol and slid open the glass door and went to sit with my mom. Or rather, I sat in the room where my mom’s body was and where I looked from pastel corner to corner and then out at the blue water and then asked, Where are you?

I talked to her wherever she was. We laughed about how my dad was playing host, probably offering the worker guys iced tea. I told her my sisters and I would make sure my dad was ok. I sat and breathed next to her not breathing body.

Then I went back out into the living room to be with Amy who had also finished her calls. Rocky was swearing and then grumbling in the kitchen. Finally he announced to my dad, “This opening is not made to specs.” In other words, the new dishwasher—guaranteed to fit —did not fit.

Amy looked to me and we sank lower onto the couch laughing quietly shaking our heads at the strangeness of it all.

“You know this is Mom,” Amy said. “She really didn’t want us to be sad!”

Eventually Rocky and his partner wheeled the old dishwasher out of our condo. It had taken some dismantling of tile work, but the new dishwasher was humming quietly, its red signal light on.

I called the mortuary.

My dad went to the bedroom to sit next to his wife. Or rather, to sit one more time next to the body of the wife he lived with and slept next to and laughed with for fifty-six years.

Mom would’ve liked that the reason we kept her body close to us longer, was not because we couldn’t bear to let it go, but rather, because we couldn’t bear to do dishes by hand one more day. That is how she would have told the story, preferring that detail even more than the sea turtle or the marriage proposal on the sand.

Maybe this is one of the things my mom and I did for one another in our longstanding love. I eventually learned to laugh at myself, and she made space for more deep feels, and we each reaped the benefit of wider vision, a better story, a fuller life.

More Resources

Last weekend I facilitated a workshop on writing about grief and a woman in our group told us about a podcast I had not heard of called Griefcast. Each week, the host, Cariad Lloyd, talks with a different comedian about someone that person has lost. The conversations are honest and often sad, but also of course, they are people who have a talent for seeing the humor in everything. As Cariad says in the introduction, “It’s bleak, but you’ll laugh too.”

Alice Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Tragicomic (2006) was one of my favorite reads last year.

My next writing workshop, Beyond the Obituary: Writing End-of-Life Stories is schedule for Saturday, March 6, 10 am-1 pm. The workshop is free and is offered with support from Idaho Humanities Council. Donations to the McCall Arts and Humanities Council are welcome.

That writing workshop is also part of McCall’s Cabin Fever Series: Conversations on Aging and Dying which includes workshops and panels on a variety of topics including grief, end-of-life planning, and caregiving. All events are online and participants do not need to live in McCall to join.

Thank you for reading Tending to Endings. I would love to have you as a subscriber! Leave your name and email below, and Tending to Endings will arrive in your inbox on the first Friday of every month. Thank you!

January 8, 2021January 8, 2021

Writing Life

Tending to Endings (fifty-one)

My friend Ana and I went for a walk sometime mid spring as the pandemic was taking hold, me walking in the street and Ana on the sidewalk so that we could keep six feet between us. We were not yet sure how the pandemic would affect us financially or health wise or, even more concerning, how it would affect our children, all in their twenties and still launching their adult lives.

Hospitals in Italy and in New York were filling with patients and running out of ventilators. Our empty neighborhood streets seemed eerie, like the quiet before a storm of the likes we had never seen and we did not understand.

We talked about how hard it was to write anything of substance while the whole world felt topsy turvy. We talked about not knowing what was even important enough to write about. I had just started Tending to Endings, and I couldn’t decide whether a blog about death and dying during a pandemic was serendipitous or the worst timing ever.

And then I yelled over the curb, Nouns! We don’t have to write anything important but we need to journal and include nouns!

Ana nodded, and cocked her head, waiting. She is a good friend, and she knows if she gives me time I’ll eventually make more sense.

I told her how when I go through times of great upheaval—say, the complicated pregnancy where I didn’t know for months whether my sons would make it—I cannot write anything of substance. During those long days that turned into months, I couldn’t even read anything but formulaic detective novels.

But I jotted down things in my journal each day. A few thoughts. A couple feelings. And yes, people, places and things: the green pitcher of water on the end table, the hyacinth growing through hard cracks in the flowerbed, the medication pump I wore clipped to my pajamas that was the shape and size of a pack of Camel non-filters.

Someday that would become my favorite story, but I hadn’t lived it yet.

Flannery O’Connor famously said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” I love this quote and during calmer times when I have reserves, I find it true.

But during times of illness or huge loss or upheaval, I’m not sure the first order of writing for me is about making sense of anything at all. All that matters is whether my babies are going to make it to the point where they have skin that will withstand touch and lungs that will breathe air.

Instead, I think that during chaotic and confusing times, times of loss, writing tethers me like some umbilical cord between inner and outer worlds. It is how I don’t lose sight of what is right at my feet when anything more than this step is too much. I write thoughts, feelings, and concrete nouns, while every sentence on the page really says the same thing. I’m here. I’m here. I’m still here.

My favorite places to teach writing have always been with those in the midst of things or on a precipice of big change: juvenile detention centers, the school for pregnant and parenting teens, at camp on a wilderness adventure, the cancer unit of a Boise hospital. There is something about creativity that is begun amidst upheaval—before we know where things might go or how they might end—that feels particularly vivid. Maybe it is only that writing in the middle of things means I have to pay attention. And paying attention makes for better art and better life.

I was excited back in 2001 to teach the drop-in workshop at what was then called Mountain States Tumor Institute in Boise. The class was part of a new integrative health program open to cancer patients and caregivers and hospital staff. And I was nervous, too. I didn’t have much experience in a medical setting and I wondered how it would go with so many different perspectives in the room during such a vulnerable time.

One of the books I read in preparation for the workshop at the hospital was John Fox’s Poetic Medicine. It is full of poems and anecdotes and teaching ideas. But one of my favorite lines of the book is from the preface which was written by another author, Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.:

Our poetry allows us to remember that our integrity is not in our body, that despite our physical limitations, our suffering and our fears, there is something in us that is not touched, something shining. Our poetry is its voice.

And what I remember most about that conference room as we lifted our heads to listen to what each had written was how poems would begin with chemo or medical charts and make their way to planting green beans in the garden after work or the puppy that the grandkids brought by for a visit or the messy sweetness of a shared slice of watermelon. It didn’t matter who was a patient or a chaplain or a caregiver or a teacher. We could see each other, and we were all here.

Resources on Writing

In February I’m offering a three-part workshop focused on saving family stories for future generations: Writing Family Memoirs: Getting Started. Please take a look at my workshop and events page if you or or someone you know might be interested.

I will also be teaching two half-day writing workshops through the McCall Arts and Humanities Council, Room for Grief: Writing through Loss will be held online on January 23 and Beyond the Obituary: Writing End-of-Life Stories will be held online on March 6. These events are free but with a suggested donation to the McCall Arts and Humanities Council for those who can offer support. I would love to see you there!

If you want to explore writing on your own, two classics that I’ve found particularly helpful for getting into the practice of writing are Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within.

Other Resources

The McCall workshops listed above are offered as part of a winter series: Looking Ahead: Conversations on Aging and Dying offered by Community Hub McCall. They are open to the public and explore many topics I’ve written about in Tending to Endings including a Death Cafe event, advance care planning, and caregiving. I’m excited to attend some of these events myself. Sessions are online and either free or for a suggested donation.

If you would like to receive Tending to Endings the first Friday of every month, please leave your name and email below. Tending to Endings aims to build community and conversation around end-of-life matters. It is always free, and I do not share your info. Thank you for your interest!

December 4, 2020December 4, 2020

Favorite Reads 2020

Tending to Endings (forty-eight)

Before starting Tending to Endings, I blogged primarily about what I was reading, and at the end of the year I’d share a list of favorites. I want to continue that tradition here. Though not all of these fit neatly into the category of end-of-life literature, many do, and others explore relevant themes like grief, mending family relationships, and spirituality.

A number of these titles were highlighted in Tendings this year, and so I’ve included links to the corresponding posts in case you missed them. I also tagged them by Tending to Ending theme and included links to excerpts or other interesting information.

Anything I read (or reread) this year is fair game, no matter when it was published. Also I’m offering these, not from the point of view of a critic, but rather, a lover of literature. Each is a book that if we were going for a walk together, I would want to tell you about to share the experience.

The first ten are books I’ve found myself recommending over and over. Afterwards, I list all of the other books read and enjoyed this year. They are all favorites that I am excited to share. Feel free to leave questions, and please do include your own favorites in the comments!

Three of these are in this year’s list. Oliver and Wiman were favorites in prior years.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alice Bechdel (2006)

I have not gotten into graphic novels much. I don’t know how to read them exactly, picture first, words first, all the words on a page and then all the pictures? But this book—which is actually a graphic memoir rather than a graphic novel—wooed me completely. It is funny, sad, poignant, witty, silly, deep. There are also a lot of literature major jokes throughout, which was an added joy for me. I fell in love with it and sent it to three friends before I finished. Bechdel’s father is a funeral director and nicknames their house fun home, short for funeral home. New York Times writer Sean Wilsey offers an excellent overview in “The Things They Buried.” (Talking about Death, Grief, Relationship Work)

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants , Robin Wall Kimmerer (2015)

Kimmerer weaves her knowledge as a scientist with her cultural wisdom and memoir to create a book that gives me guidance for my daily living, and also hope for our communities and our planet. I listened to this one first on Audible and then bought the print version because I knew it was a book I wanted to return to. I keep running into others who are reading and loving this book, which adds to my hopefulness. I included a bit about this book in the June 26 post, Listening to Land. (Ancestors, Community, Story)

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin (1963)

I read a lot of books about race this year, and admired, learned from, and appreciated many of them. But these two essays by Baldwin continue to be some of the most beautiful and instructive I’ve read. Fire Next Time is an example of writing that manages to be angry and compassionate at the very same time. Baldwin’s skill as a writer and his honesty as a human gives him a unique power to contextualize discussion of race in America while at the same time transcending the usual obstacles of those discussions. I included quotes from this book in the September 18 post, Slow Food (Talking about Death, Relationship Work, Community).

When the Light Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, Edited by Joy Harjo (2020)

One of the things I’ve learned this year is how limited my education has been. This is true even though I have a couple of college degrees and have been a teacher my entire adult life. There are so many voices, perspectives, and histories I’ve missed. As an example, I taught high school English at a time the same 2-3 Native voices were in every anthology. Often only excerpts of poems were included, as though there wasn’t much to choose from. This book puts that practice to shame. It is a gorgeous book full of Native Nations voices (160 plus poets from 100 indigenous nations) from the 1600s to the present including brief biographical and geographical information for each poet. I am so excited about this book, which I find far more enjoyable than the average Norton anthology. Joy Harjo, Poet Laureate for the US, writes a beautiful and compelling Introduction to the book. (Ancestors, Grief, Story, Community)

Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, Linda Hogan (2007)

I read three books by Linda Hogan this year and love all of them. This slim book of essays was my favorite probably because I am an essayist at heart and anyone who can do it this well gets my full attention. Like Hogan’s poetry and fiction, these essays are grounded in the natural world and weave together wisdom, story, musical language, and exquisite imagery. The theme of this collection spoke to me during a year when many of us are spending a great deal of time in our dwellings. Here is the title essay, Dwellings, as it appeared in the Indiana Review. I also included a bit about this book in the September 18 post, Slow Food. (Talking about Death, Grief, Story)

The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully, Frank Ostaseski (2017)

Dying (and living) involves a great deal we cannot control. Ostaseski’s book offers a window into how and why to proceed with an open heart anyway. He was one of the founders of Zen Hospice Center in the 1980s. He combines wisdom with experience with eloquence in such a way that this is one of my favorite books on the topic. I wrote about this book in the March 20 post, Welcome. (Talking about Death, Caregiving, Community)

Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong , John O’Donohue (2000)

I read this book of reflections a little at a time during my morning meditations, and I always looked forward to it. I wasn’t sure whether to include it at first because I my favorite of O’Donohue’s is still Anam Cara. But then I realized I’ve written down more quotes from this book than any other this year. It helped me through. Here is one:

Prayer is not about the private project of making yourself holy and turning yourself into a shiny temple that blinds everyone else. Prayer has a deeper priority, which is in the old language, the sanctification of the world of which you are a privileged inhabitant. By being here, you are already a custodian of sacred places and spaces. If you could but see what your prayer could do you would always want to be in the presence that awakens.

I included more quotes from this book in the September 18 post, Slow Food. (Spirituality)

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit (2009)

I think every year, Rebecca Solnit has made my list at least once. I love her philosophical perspective, her lyrical writing, and her activism. I had purchased her memoir this year thinking I’d read it, but then, with the pandemic and the social justice protests and the fallout from our political divide, this older book moved to my nightstand instead.

In A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit studies five major disasters and the communities that arose in the aftermath. It gives interesting context to historical figures I’ve only known in broad strokes, like William James and Dorothy Day. Solnit argues that while the press and leaders often tell a story of chaos and unrest, life on the ground after these events tells a much more complex story. In the wake of disasters, she argues, “We remain ourselves for the most part, but freed to act on, most often, not the worst but the best within. The ruts and routines of ordinary life hide more beauty than brutality.”

Like all of Solnit’s work, this philosophy isn’t presented only to help us feel better. In giving many examples of how people have responded to disaster in the past, she makes a case that in crisis, there is opportunity to change our culture for the better if we seize it and come together to act towards the common good. (Caregiving, Community, Storytelling.)

The Murmur of Bees, Sofìa Segovia, translated by Simon Bruni (2015)

I read many excellent novels this year, and this is the only fiction on my top ten list, which is not usual for me. I think I leaned towards nonfiction for the top list this year because it has been a time of truth telling on so many levels. But the long list of novels below reminds me how much fiction adds to life as well. I don’t think anything objective made this one rise above the first few titles in the fiction list below, but rather, timing. All are compelling stories beautifully told. But, I read this book in March during the first weeks of quarantine, and Murmur of Bees is a family saga told with a quality of magical realism set in against the backdrop of the 1917 flu epidemic. I didn’t know this last fact until I was at a quarter of the way into the novel, but the synchronicity and historical perspective on that plight made the experience of reading feel intimate and a bit magical in itself.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, Isabelle Wilkerson (2020)

Wilkerson’s Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration has been a favorite nonfiction book since it was published in 2010. It expanded my view of American history with extensively researched beautiful storytelling. This book, too, is about the history of racial hierarchy in America and is told with thoroughness and precision.

The tone and the tenor of this book is different from Warmth. Wilkerson is direct and unflinching in her account, and I couldn’t help but think of how painful it must have been to research and archive these stories for us day after day. My sense was always that Wilkerson was doing so, to save us all from ourselves. I am so grateful for her commitment to this generous and important work. It is a book that has motivated me to not look away and to look for how I can take action with love.

A friend sent this quote from the epilogue of Caste, and it has become a sort of guidepost and reminder for me, that this is longterm work, and this is my work:

Caste is a disease, and none of us is immune. It is as if alcoholism is encoded into the country’s DNA, and can never be declared fully cured. It is like cancer that goes into remission only to return when the immune system of the body politic is weakened…Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we would imagine we would feel…Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across the ocean.

This summer, the New York Times Magazine published a feature, America’s Enduring Caste System, by Isabel Wilkerson. (Relationship Work, Grief, Ancestors, Talking about Death).

Other Books I Loved

I probably don’t need to explain why this year’s list is longer than usual. The first few under each heading were contenders for the top list, and then they fall in random order.

Fiction

The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates (2019)

The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett (2020)

The People of the Whale, Linda Hogan (2008)

The Widower‘s Tale, Julia Glass (2011)

Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli. (2019)

The Dutch House, Ann Patchett (2019)

How Much of These Hills is Gold, C. Pam Zhang (2020)

The Book of Longing, Sue Monk Kidd (2020)

Three Junes, Julia Glass (2003)

A Spool of Blue Thread, Ann Tyler (2015)

Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo (2019)

Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Kathrine Ann Porter (1939)

Crooked Hallalujah, Kelli Ford (2020)

Father of the Rain, Lily King (2011)

Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery (1908) — This was my anti-anxiety medicine during our eternal election week.

The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowel (2020)–the third in the Lady Astronaut Series.

The Moon Bamboo, Thich Nhat Hanh (1989)

The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood (2011)

American Gods, Tenth Anniversary Edition Full Cast, Audible Production, Neil Gaiman (2011)

The Time of Butterflies, Julia Alverez (2007)

What We Keep, Elizabeth Berg (2015)

Poetry

Dark, Sweet, Linda Hogan (2014)

An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo (2019)

The Tradition, Jericho Brown (2019)

Owls and Other Fantasies, Mary Oliver (2006)

Memory of Elephants, Sherman Alexie (2020) — letterpress chapbook through Limb erlost Press , Idaho

Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine (2014)

Memoir and Biography

Two illustrated biographies for children: Enormous Smallness: A Story of E.E. Cummings, Matthew Burgess (2015) and Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring, Matthew Burgess (2020).

A Little Bit of Wisdom: Conversations with a Nez Perce Elder, Horace Axtell and Margo Aragon (1997)

The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life, David Carr (2009)

The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom (2020)

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, Madeline L’Engle (1980)

Other Nonfiction

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander (2010)

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chodron (1997)

Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman (1949)

How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi (2019)

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi (2016)

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, Robin DiAngelo (2018)

Dying Well: Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life, Ira Byock (1997)

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, Jia Tolentino (2019)

I would love to read your own favorite reads of 2020 in the comments! (If you don’t see a comment box below, click here and scroll to the bottom of the post).

I will be posting twice more this year to get to a nice round 50 posts. Then, starting in January, Tending to Endings will run once a month on the first Friday. If you don’t want to miss an installment, please subscribe and I will send a copy to your email address. Tending to Endings is cost free and ad-free, and I do not share your info. Thank you!

November 13, 2020November 14, 2020

Living On

Tending to Endings (forty-five)

Legacy has always seemed to me a weighty word, reserved for the powerful or wealthy or famous. People who get buildings and scholarships and highways named after them. To think or write about my own legacy would seem pretentious and related to image or ego.

And then I think of Marian Pritchett who I met in the late 1990s, at what was then known as Booth Memorial School for Pregnant and Parenting Teens. The school was housed in a brick building in Boise’s leafy north end. Teenagers who were pregnant or new parents could learn child development along with algebra at a school with onsite day care, and guidance on college applications.

I was going to visit the school once a week through a relatively new nonprofit arts program called Writers in the Schools. I was enthused about this assignment. I had twin toddlers myself, and I knew how pregnancy and birth opened a huge opportunity for creativity.

But my enthusiasm was no match for Marian’s whose eyes lit up at our planning meeting when I told her about writing poetry with the students and putting together a book at the end of the semester. She smiled widely and said she was just sure the program was going to be wonderful. She couldn’t wait for me to meet her students.

What I thought next was that Marian must be a new teacher. All that positive energy and no shadow of skepticism or the edgy humor I was used to in veteran teachers, even the most caring. Teenagers have a way of breaking your heart, after all.

When I was getting ready to leave, I asked Marian how long she had taught at Booth. “This is my twentieth year,” she said, “Before that I was at Boise High.” Marian, it turns out, was also the school principal.

The school was named after Marian Pritchett in 2002. Photo Credit: Chris Butler, Idaho Statesman.

Over the next few years I visited Booth every Wednesday, and the students and Marian and I all wrote together. I learned that Marian’s enthusiasm was not just demeanor. She backed it up with unwavering support for her students. She showed up for them whether they were showing up for themselves or not. She called them when they didn’t make it to class. She sat with them as they filled out college applications. When they read their poems aloud after our writing time, her eyes often glistened with tears and pride. Marian consistently reflected back to her students their own intelligence, and strength, worth.

I was writing for parenting magazines during that time, and I worked with one of the young moms who had graduated from Booth to write her story for American Baby Magazine. Jaimie Skinner wrote about the transformation that happened after she arrived at the school:

One of the awful things about being a pregnant teen is that just when you’re feeling the worst about yourself–guilty, ashamed, afraid–people tend to confirm that view…
After almost being expelled for poor attendance and very low grades, I transferred to Booth Memorial High School. I was even having regular thoughts of suicide. It’s ironic that a woman can feel most isolated when she’s carrying a life inside of her, but pregnancy is lonely when it’s not celebrated by the people around you.
The head teacher at Booth, Marian Pritchett, called my house every morning to make sure I was heading in…I spent a lot of time with Marian, who understood what I was going through. As I began to care about myself, I also started feeling compassion for my baby.

Marian’s death in 2002 of a brain aneurysm was unexpected and devastating for her family and her students and all of us who knew her. I attended her funeral still heavy with shock and grief. When I entered the church, it was already full of so many young women with children by their side, and some not so young anymore. The crowd grew and grew–her family and her students and former students and their families and her colleagues and leaders in the community–until people could no longer squeeze into the pews.

I do not remember much of what was said at that service almost two decades ago, but I remember all those babies on all those laps and the way their coos and their cries lifted us. It was the first time I had that strange sensation at funeral or memorial service, of grief being matched with gratitude. How empty the loss and how full the love left behind.

Later that year, the school name was changed to Marian Pritchett High School, and teachers continued to help many young women and eventually young fathers, too, to continue their education after becoming parents.

Last year, the campus was sold and after some attempts at moving the school the district instead combined it with another alternative high school. It was a heartbreaking loss for the community. But I will always think of Marian’s legacy not as any building or school but as all those women and their children and the lives they are living.

To me, this is the most profound form of legacy, the way we become a part of each other’s stories. On this count, Marian outdid herself.

I reached out again to Jaimie, when I started working on this post. We hadn’t talked since we met at a coffee shop all those years ago to plan the story. She is now mom to two daughters and two sons. The daughter she wrote about in the magazine article has recently graduated college. Jaimie is a teacher having worked for five years overseas and now back at a high school in Boise where she teaches English to new immigrants including refugees who have resettled here.

Last year, she and her husband founded Rising Phoenix a youth leadership organization with an international service-learning focus. They sponsor children in Rwanda and the Congo.

Jaimie and I talked about Marian and how she influences us still. She talked about the idea of legacy:

I don’t really care if I’m remembered, but I want to make a difference in my student’s lives. I talk about Marian to my students all the time. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t had someone like that in my life at that time. In that way I want to continue her legacy.

And maybe that is why remembering people matters. Not so much to give credit, which I doubt would have mattered to Marian. But so that we remember what they have given us that we can now carry forward.

Marian, who was never officially my teacher, may have influenced my teaching more than anyone else over the next twenty years. Through her example, she gave me permission to enthusiastically believe in my students even when the odds might not seem in their favor. She lived the adage that love is a verb by showing up for students each day in big and small ways. If I ever questioned the effectiveness of this philosophy, all I had to do was think back to that afternoon in that church and that strong beautiful community who gathered to say thank you and goodbye.

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